Two communities in one town
Every medieval university town had to share its streets with a population that did not belong to the university. In Cambridge this meant townspeople, who were merchants, innkeepers, tradesmen, landlords and the burgesses who governed the borough, and scholars, who came and went in large numbers, wore clerical dress and claimed their own legal status. Later English usage would call this pairing “town and gown,” and while the phrase is not medieval, the tensions it names certainly were.
The relationship was not simply hostile. Scholars were customers: they rented rooms, bought food, candles, parchment and books, and paid for services. A university brought money to a market town of modest size. But the same arrangement created recurring friction, and for much of the Middle Ages the town and university argued about who held authority.
Sources of friction
Several issues came up repeatedly:
- Rents and lodging. Demand from students could push up rents. Universities often won the right to have lodging rents assessed by a panel including masters, which townspeople saw as unfair interference with property they owned.
- Prices and trading standards. The chancellor of the university gained powers to inspect weights, measures and the quality of some goods, which overlapped with the town’s own officers.
- Courts and punishment. Scholars counted as clerics and could claim trial in university or church courts. When a student was accused of harming a townsperson, residents often felt justice was slow or biased. When a townsperson attacked a student, the university looked to royal protection.
- Public order. Groups of young men, some armed, with alcohol and disputes between students from different regions, could spark brawls.
Royal governments tended to back the university, partly because scholars were a source of trained administrators and clerics. Over time kings granted charters that confirmed the chancellor’s authority over many matters in the town. That increased the university’s power and resentment of it.
The events of 1381
The most dramatic episode came during the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, a wave of uprisings, sparked in part by a new poll tax, against taxation and social restrictions. In Cambridge, townspeople joined in the unrest and attacked university property and officials. According to accounts, they seized and burned documents that recorded university privileges and forced the university to give up some of its claims, and rioters targeted colleges, with Corpus Christi, the college linked to town guilds, apparently among those damaged.
The precise details, including numbers involved and how much was done by townsmen as against outside rebels, are less clear than the general outline. What most sources agree on is that the revolt gave the town a chance to challenge privileges it resented. The disorder did not last. After the rising was put down, the crown restored and expanded the university’s position, and the town’s authority over some matters was reduced. The episode shows how much of the revolt in towns was about local rights as well as national taxation, which is why historians see the Peasants Revolt as more than a single protest about money.
Oxford as the elder sibling
Cambridge also lived in the shadow of Oxford. Oxford was older and larger for most of the Middle Ages, and its colleges and masters had a stronger reputation, especially in theology and philosophy. Scholars regularly moved between the two, and Cambridge colleges borrowed Oxford’s models for statutes.
Rivalry existed, but it was not constant warfare. The two universities were often partners, pressed by the same concerns about royal favor, papal support and local disputes. The clearest recorded difference is in size and prestige: Cambridge was the junior partner. Stories of rival nicknames and jokes belong largely to later centuries.
Royal patronage and the great colleges
The fifteenth century brought a new pattern. Instead of bishops and nobles supporting small colleges for a handful of graduates, the crown became a major patron.
King’s College was founded in 1441 by King Henry VI, who also founded Eton College as a feeder school for it. The plan was ambitious, with provision for a substantial community of scholars, and the project was tied to the king’s personal piety and wish to leave a lasting memorial. Work on the great chapel began soon after, but it was interrupted by the political troubles of Henry’s reign and was finished only in the early sixteenth century.
Queens’ College was founded in 1448 by Margaret of Anjou, Henry’s queen, and later refounded under the patronage of Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Edward IV. The apostrophe in its name, placed after the s, commemorates the two queens.
These foundations were bound up with the dynastic conflict of the later fifteenth century, a period usually called the Wars of the Roses, in which the house of Lancaster and the house of York contended for the crown. Royal favor could shift with the political winds, which made it a mixed blessing for a college.
A larger and more collegiate university
By the end of the Middle Ages Cambridge looked different from its early days. Colleges had increased in number and had begun to take in younger students and teach them within their own walls, instead of leaving them to hostels. The university itself remained a federation in which colleges, which owned buildings and property, sat beside the central body that controlled degrees and exams.
Cambridge’s role in learning also widened. Alongside traditional theology and arts, humanist interests from Italy began to appear around the end of the period. The full effect of that change fell largely after the medieval period, in the time of Henry VIII and his successors.
Why the tension matters
The conflict between town and university is a useful reminder that medieval institutions had to bargain for their space. The university’s privileges protected scholars, but they also shaped long-lasting local politics. Understanding Cambridge as both a place of study and a place with an ordinary civic life, with rents, trades, rivalries and riots, gives a more accurate picture than the image of a quiet cloister of scholars.